Author fflgoo

We will enter the Monday night game of FFL-GOO wild card playoff weekend with both playoff games undecided and the top two seeds breathing a huge sigh of relief they had byes this week.

#1 seed Keystone Longfellows have scored 23 points, with a CBS projected score of 37 points (WR Diggs and K Janikowski in the Monday night game). #2 seed Boston Blowfish finished their playoff bye scoring only 38 points. Those are the lowest scores of all playoff teams. KEY and BBF sure appear to have dodged a bullet during their playoff byes.

#3 seed New Pepper Patriots look to be in trouble, clinging to a 43-42 lead over #6 seed Happy Valley Violence. NPP is done for the week, but HVV has two players in the Monday night game (RB Chris Carson, TE Kyle Rudolf). CBS projects the final score to be 51-43 in favor of the Violence, which would be a big upset.

Overall point leader and #4 seed Dallas Armadillos have posted the highest score so far of playoff teams, but find themselves in a 73-68 tussle with the #5 seed Boston Wildcats. DAL has WR Tyler Lockett in the Monday night game, while BOS has WR Adam Thielen. CBS has Dallas as a 60/40 favorite, projecting a 78-76 final score.

Congratulations to the Boston Blowfish, winners of the Engle Division, #2 playoff seed, and first-round playoff bye by virtue of their 61-57 win over New Pepper. The Patriots will take the #3 seed into the playoffs.

Also congratulations to Happy Valley who captured the final wild card spot by beating the Froglickers 34-19 while at the same time the Chicago Mud failed to grab the final playoff spot in losing 62-36 to the Beach Dudes.

Here are the playoff matchups for the Wild Card round of the playoffs.

What looked like a pretty clear playoff picture entering the Week 12 Monday night game was turned on its ear after Lamar Miller’s big game propelled Happy Valley to an upset win over Keystone. Additional upset losses by the Armadillos and the Blowfish have created a logjam.

Not only are the Violence back in the playoff hunt, we have the possibility of 4 teams tied with 7-5 records for the 3 wild card positions.

Keystone Longfellows (8-3) and New Pepper Patriots (7-4) are division winners by virtue of head-to-head tiebreakers over the 2nd-place teams in their divisions: Dallas Armadillos (7-4) and Boston Wildcats (7-5) respectively.

Game of the Week #1 is Boston Blowfish vs. New Pepper. Both teams are 7-4. The Blowfish would clinch their division with a win.

Game of the Week #2 is Chicago Mud vs. Orange County. With a win, the Mud would clinch a playoff spot at 7-4-1 AND could still win their division if the Blowfish lose. A Mud loss here opens the door for the Violence.

*Any and/or all of these four teams could finish 7-5. The applicable tiebreaking rules are described in Rules 4.3.2 and 4.4. In a nutshell, HVV would lose tiebreakers on best net points to any other 7-5 team.

ALSO: drop/add goes back to first-come, first-serve after the trade deadline.

AND, only players on a roster from week 11 forward can be protected going into 2019 season.

The league spreadsheet will be updated late next week (Friday after Thanksgiving, most likely).

With 3 weeks left in the regular season, it appears as though teams will need around 7 wins to make the playoffs.

Keystone is already at 7 wins

4 other teams (DAL, BBF, NPP, and BOS) have 6 wins.

Those teams have a pretty good shot at making the playoffs (3 division winners + next 3 best records as wild cards).

MER, OCD, and MIA (3 wins) would need a lot of help.

PHI (2 wins) is probably technically out of contention.

The remaining teams (BOB, CHI, HVV, FFL) will likely be in contention for the final playoff spot or two.

In the points race, it’s looking more like a 2-team battle down the stretch. KEY is in the lead, DAL is in second place, and all other teams are over 100 points behind DAL. At this pace, the only competition will be between Terry and Sam.

With the trade deadline one week away, we have a trade to report: Dallas Armadillos have traded TE Rob Gronkowski and a 2019 2nd round pick to the Orange County Beach Dudes for WR Keenan Allen and a 2019 6th round pick.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS:

— Kickoff week 11 (next week) is the trade deadline.
— ALSO: drop/add goes back to first-come, first-serve after the trade deadline.
— AND, only players on a roster from week 11 and forward can be protected going into 2019 season.

With 3 division championships and 3 wild cards up for grabs, it’s clear there’s a divide as we hit the home stretch. Six teams (KEY, BOS, BBF, DAL, CHI and NPP) in our league have winning records and would take those playoff spots if the season ended today. BOB and HVV at 4-4 are on the cusp. And while no one has been technically eliminated yet from playoff or wild card contention, five teams with either 2-6 or 3-5 records have a steep hill to climb: MIA, OCD, FFL, PHI, and MER.

Goo! Happy Saturday after a Penn State win. It’s a rainy day in New England so I watched the Lions win and am now watching the Red Sox and finally finished something I think you all might enjoy: I’ve backfilled our FFL-GOO league W-L and division standings into CBS Sports.

The big caveat here is historical information is associated with the FRANCHISE. I can enter info prior to 2011 for the existing teams in CBS, but I can’t edit team names to reflect history prior to 2011.

CHI Mud is listed with 4 titles under Most Championships, but the first of those two (1993 and 1996) were from when Sam owned the team (LA Riot!) from 1992-1997.

New Pepper is listed with 2 titles, but the first of those is when the franchise was State College Bandits (our first champion in 1992).

Happy Valley was originally Pittsburgh, and was Mission Viejo before returning to State College.

This history page (accessible under League > History in the nav menu at the top of our League pages on CBS) has our total W-L. Clicking a year under the Championships list will take you to a page with final division standings for that year, playoff games, and badge for the points champion too.

(NOTE: Points and head-to-head history on the CBS Sports site still only go back to 2011 when we started using that platform.)

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT HISTORY…

We are into the second half of our 2018 season, and there is a clear top/bottom divide entering week 8.
– Six teams have 5 or 4 wins.
– Six teams have 1 or 2 wins.
– The only team in a middle tier is 3-4 Chicago, despite scoring 3rd most points – they’ve had the most points scored against them (524)

We had our first in-season trade this year: Griffins sending LeSean McCoy to New Pepper. Of course there are conditional clauses involving potential draft picks! It wouldn’t be a Griffin trade without it!(The Fine Print: PHI **may** have NPP’s 2019[5] in the LeSean McCoy deal. PHI gets the additional pick if a) McCoy averages 6pts/game or more weeks 8-17 not including a bye week; and b) NPP makes it to the Fantasy Bowl game; and c) if McCoy is not suspended 4 games or more. All 3 conditions must be met for PHI to get the additional pick.)

REMINDER: We are 3 weeks away from the FFL trade deadline, which is kickoff week 11.

REMINDER: Protected players for next year must be on an FFL roster continuously starting week 11 this year (e.g. players “added” after kickoff week 11 are not eligible for protection for 2019 season).